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Abstract:Thanks to the increasing availability of consumer head-mounted displays, educational applications of immersive VR could
now reach to the general public, especially if they include gaming elements (immersive serious games). Safety education of citizens
could be a particularly promising domain for immersive serious games, because people tend not to pay attention to and benefit from
current safety materials. In this paper, we propose an HMD-based immersive game for educating passengers about aviation safety
that allows players to experience a serious aircraft emergency with the goal of surviving it. We compare the proposed approach to a
traditional aviation safety education method (the safety card) used by airlines. Unlike most studies of VR for safety knowledge
acquisition, we do not focus only on assessing learning immediately after the experience but we extend our attention to knowledge
retention over a longer time span. This is a fundamental requirement, because people need to retain safety procedures in order to
apply them when faced with danger. A knowledge test administered before, immediately after and one week after the experimental
condition showed that the immersive serious game was superior to the safety card. Moreover, subjective as well as physiological
measurements employed in the study showed that the immersive serious game was more engaging and fear-arousing than the safety
card, a factor that can contribute to explain the obtained superior retention, as we discuss in the paper.